it seems that one of the more accepted readings of "The Return" is that Cooper failed his mission and what he set out to do. having seen "The Return" several times now and especially having been able to see it all in a few 4-5 hours sittings spread out over a couple of days gives greater resonance to my belief that Cooper is very much on the right track, guided by Major Briggs and The Fireman. We all know that Briggs had foreseen the events at the Sherrif Station and the whole series is Cooper's journey towards that very point and onwards.

a very common theme in David Lynch movies is the main character with a good heart that is bogged down by a troubled existance, ignorance and a suffocating clown suit of negativity, who through a journey reaches enlightenment (which from my reading is exactly what happens in Audrey's storyline - try watching all of her scenes in order but on their own and you'll notice how she is all the time coming slightly closer to enlightenment and realization. Her dance is the representation of total enlightenment and after that her suffocating clown suit of negativity - Charlie - has no longer any hold of her and she is free).

Cooper in the "Dougie suit" is pretty similiar to this concept as well.. just like so many of us he goes through life just existing, he's neither happy nor sad, he eats, he have sex, he works, he sleeps. He just is... when he finally defeats this mental state he sheds that skin and finds himself again as someone that truly LIVES, who not only does the little things in life but enjoys the little things in life and can find the wonders and miracles that a life holds. of course the whole thing might be a dream sequence (i have a feeling that most of what we see between ep. 1 and early ep. 18 might be a disassciative state that Cooper experiences in the lodge. when he wakes up from the coma in ep. 16 he says to Gordon that he has reached number 10 - the number of completion and that means that it is now time to head to Twin Peaks and face his doppelganger and the demon that inhabits him once and for all.

once both The Doppelganger and BOB is dead he places the ring on its finger (fulfilling the plan that Philip Jeffries had for it). but Mister C was not only some funhouse mirror Cooper, he was always a part of Cooper - Coop without any of his good side to balance the darkness we all carry within, the shadow self of Cooper as Jung described it (see here). Perhaps then the disassociated/somewhat transpartent Cooper head is the REAL Cooper that should hold both of his Yin & Yang selfs to be complete (doppelganger and regular Coop) which will take some time before it will merge back to normal. But suddenly the lights go out in the Sherrif's station and you can hear Gordon and Coop yelling to each other as they, together with Diane, are transported to the furnace in The Great Northern (the subconscious of the floating Coop head i take it). Now the floating Coop head disappears as the two halves have merged due to the fact that he succesfully overcame his darkest impulses and have reached total enlightenment (the number of completion).

but then now we get to the final part where he ask Philip Jeffries to transport him back in time to save Laura from being murdered, which in itself is very odd and at first glance doesn't jive with neither what we know of Cooper or of Laura's final faith in FWWM. It's especially heartbreaking how we see Cooper's "saving" action violently tear Laura away from the place where she met her angels. Still, we know that The Fireman and Major Briggs has been guiding him throughout the season and to this point, and we also know that The Fireman was instrumental in creating Laura and sending her to earth (from ep. . and we also know that Joudy (or who i presume to be Judy) absolutely loses her shit at the point Laura is saved (the stabbing of the portrait). Could it be that Laura was absolutely never meant to die in the first place and it was actually this event that fucked up the timelines and let Joudy take a much stronger hold, so much so that she now even can use the Palmer house and Mrs. Palmer as her place of hibernation. and it is this that Briggs/Cooper/Fireman is trying to reverse... note that Philip Jeffries say of the date February 23, 1989 -"THIS IS WHERE YOU WILL FIND JUDY"

i mean we all die and Laura was mortal so of course she would have been dead anyway eventually but perhaps the really HUGE mistake was putting on that ring especially. we are still fuzzy on exactly how the ring works... this would make Cooper's remarks about "DON'T TAKE THE RING LAURA, DON'T TAKE THE RING" much more poignant and work beautifully within the context of the entire series.

sorry for the rambling post, and there's more to write but hopefully we can get some discussion going here.

Yes, I wondered that. Lynch has seemingly developed a great love of Laura and his raison d’être appears to me have shifted from the original idea of the ‘dead girl’ macguffin leading to new stories in the town to making Laura the main character in his fantasy landscape...

Yes, I wondered that. Lynch has seemingly developed a great love of Laura and his raison d’être appears to me have shifted from the original idea of the ‘dead girl’ macguffin leading to new stories in the town to making Laura the main character in his fantasy landscape...

I think DKL has been in love with Laura since he filmed the picnic video for the Pilot, and a huge part of his involvement in TP ever since has been an effort to exhume her and breathe life into her, from the Red Room to Maddy to FWWM. Honestly, the thing that astounded me most about TP:TR is how small a role Laura played, despite being credited in every Part for her main title appearance.

Yes, I wondered that. Lynch has seemingly developed a great love of Laura and his raison d’être appears to me have shifted from the original idea of the ‘dead girl’ macguffin leading to new stories in the town to making Laura the main character in his fantasy landscape...

I think DKL has been in love with Laura since he filmed the picnic video for the Pilot, and a huge part of his involvement in TP ever since has been an effort to exhume her and breathe life into her, from the Red Room to Maddy to FWWM. Honestly, the thing that astounded me most about TP:TR is how small a role Laura played, despite being credited in every Part for her main title appearance.

The name of Sherry Lee's new character Carrie was leaked in this forum well before the show began and I assumed Carrie was going to be a major character throughout the series. Was very surprised Carrie did not show up until the last 15 minutes!

Yes, I wondered that. Lynch has seemingly developed a great love of Laura and his raison d’être appears to me have shifted from the original idea of the ‘dead girl’ macguffin leading to new stories in the town to making Laura the main character in his fantasy landscape...

I think DKL has been in love with Laura since he filmed the picnic video for the Pilot, and a huge part of his involvement in TP ever since has been an effort to exhume her and breathe life into her, from the Red Room to Maddy to FWWM. Honestly, the thing that astounded me most about TP:TR is how small a role Laura played, despite being credited in every Part for her main title appearance.

this is my impression as well, i never saw Laura as a Macguffin in the original series - quite the opposite. there's been several series, films and books based on unraveling the life of a person who is dead already at the stories start but the amount of love and real emotion that Lynch (and to a lesser degree Frost) poured into the creation of Laura Palmer, her life and the reactions of those who knew her is one of the top things among what made Twin Peaks so great to me. so when that got combined with the quirky and friendly town with the seedy underbelly (which Lynch really perfected here, after his first start in "Blue Velvet"), the mysteries of the Woods and the great outside character in Cooper it was just a slam dunk on all fronts. the perfect mixture of high class drama, pure horror that dealt with both the physical and otherwordly freights, crime drama / procedural and comedy, all rolled into one. i still have never seen any other show that so perfectly could balance and jump between genres and make it work like that. and that is true of all seasons... the "X-Files" and shows like that were serious, and then they had their comedy episodes, "Twin Peaks" was a rollercoaster ride between the humour and the horror and this was even more pronounced in Season 3 in some ways.

[quote=mtwentz]Carrie Page[/url]

hah, i didn't know that the Carrie Page name had been leaked beforehand.. did it come from people overhearing dialouge on the shooting of the last scene? i was flabbergasted reading through the saved spoilers thread, i'm glad i went into this knowing barely nothing. i knew that "Cooper" and "Laura" would find themeselves outside of Sarah's house sometime during the series but i would have surely not betted it to be the final scene. That would have been a total heartbreaker if that would have leaked out. i knew that Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mister C (or what looked like i imagined could be the darker Coop) would meet up outside a motel. i know a red coffee cup would fly through a window and i knew some of the shooting locations. but that was pretty much it... oh and i knew about the giant Atom Bomb print that we saw turn up in Gordon's office. all in all i'm glad i managed to hold off very much on that thread.

Gabriel wrote:Yes, I wondered that. Lynch has seemingly developed a great love of Laura and his raison d’être appears to me have shifted from the original idea of the ‘dead girl’ macguffin leading to new stories in the town to making Laura the main character in his fantasy landscape...

I think DKL has been in love with Laura since he filmed the picnic video for the Pilot, and a huge part of his involvement in TP ever since has been an effort to exhume her and breathe life into her, from the Red Room to Maddy to FWWM. Honestly, the thing that astounded me most about TP:TR is how small a role Laura played, despite being credited in every Part for her main title appearance.

[quote=mtwentz]Carrie Page[/url]

hah, i didn't know that the Carrie Page name had been leaked beforehand.. did it come from people overhearing dialouge on the shooting of the last scene? i was flabbergasted reading through the saved spoilers thread, i'm glad i went into this knowing barely nothing. i knew that "Cooper" and "Laura" would find themeselves outside of Sarah's house sometime during the series but i would have surely not betted it to be the final scene. That would have been a total heartbreaker if that would have leaked out. i knew that Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mister C (or what looked like i imagined could be the darker Coop) would meet up outside a motel. i know a red coffee cup would fly through a window and i knew some of the shooting locations. but that was pretty much it... oh and i knew about the giant Atom Bomb print that we saw turn up in Gordon's office. all in all i'm glad i managed to hold off very much on that thread.

I do not know where the information came from, but a poster here (no longer active) leaked the name 'Carrie' on the old Spoilers thread on a lazy Friday when nothing else was going on. Somebody from Showtime obviously saw it, because the hammer came down real quick. I was even asked to delete one of my messages that had referenced the name.

No other information was given out about Carrie, so not much was spoiled. However, those of us who remember that leak were not surprised when the name 'Carrie' came out of Sheryl Lee's mouth.

Maybe Laura was never supposed to die to begin with, at least not before she finally confronted & defeated her mother (JUDY). Maybe Cooper wasn't going back in time to spare her from death so much as he was trying to take her home for a final showdown with Sarah. Before she was snatched away from Cooper in the woods in Ep. 17, it looked like they were very near the entrance to the Fireman's house, which I assume could teleport them to the Palmer residence. When Mr. C initially entered the Fireman's, the big movie screen displayed a picture of la casa de Palmer, before the Fireman changed the picture to the Sheriff's Station parking lot and whisked the doppelganger there.

So perhaps Cooper failed in letting Laura ever die to begin with. In Laura's dream, Cooper instructed Laura not to take the ring. The ring (in one interpretation) sealed her fate as BOB's victim, so he had to kill her instead of possessing her, as originally intended. But what would have happened if Laura never took the ring, and BOB attempted to take her over? Would it have even worked? How would a possessing BOB interact with Laura's golden essence? Would it destroy him? And if Laura is greeted by angels when she takes the ring and dies, then can her taking the ring really be viewed as a mistake?

We still don't know what Laura whispered into Cooper's ear. Whatever was said, I imagine that Cooper and Laura could be dream traveling through time for an eternity trying to figure these things out.

Cappy wrote:Maybe Laura was never supposed to die to begin with, at least not before she finally confronted & defeated her mother (JUDY). Maybe Cooper wasn't going back in time to spare her from death so much as he was trying to take her home for a final showdown with Sarah. Before she was snatched away from Cooper in the woods in Ep. 17, it looked like they were very near the entrance to the Fireman's house, which I assume could teleport them to the Palmer residence. When Mr. C initially entered the Fireman's, the big movie screen displayed a picture of la casa de Palmer, before the Fireman changed the picture to the Sheriff's Station parking lot and whisked the doppelganger there.

So perhaps Cooper failed in letting Laura ever die to begin with. In Laura's dream, Cooper instructed Laura not to take the ring. The ring (in one interpretation) sealed her fate as BOB's victim, so he had to kill her instead of possessing her, as originally intended. But what would have happened if Laura never took the ring, and BOB attempted to take her over? Would it have even worked? How would a possessing BOB interact with Laura's golden essence? Would it destroy him? And if Laura is greeted by angels when she takes the ring and dies, then can her taking the ring really be viewed as a mistake?

We still don't know what Laura whispered into Cooper's ear. Whatever was said, I imagine that Cooper and Laura could be dream traveling through time for an eternity trying to figure these things out.

Exactly.

There is a lot of wiggle room of course. We're never told exactly what is the plan that the Fireman gave to Cooper, whether Cooper properly understood the plan, whether Cooper knew that Judy was connected to Sarah, etc.

However...

It seems clear that Cooper is intent on defeating Judy. It doesn't make sense to me that Coop got distracted from the mission to defeat Judy and just tried to save Laura because he wanted to save her for its own sake.

My guess is that the light behind Laura's face was the only thing that could defeat the darkness behind Sarah's face. Coop knew this and thus saved Laura so she could defeat Judy once and for all, or at least send her back where she came from.

On the other hand: Coop may have gone beyond what he was instructed to do by the Fireman. It's possible the Fireman warned Cooper that Judy could not be defeated, only contained, and that the Fireman was primarily concerned with keeping Judy in check by killing the Doppelganger and BOB.

I don't think he failed so much as he's been seemingly left adrift and possibly in big trouble. We haven't seen what happens next, and we'll probably never know. I'm willing to accept that he failed, it seemed to be Frost's read on it, but I don't buy the Coop fatal flaw stuff. Everything he did followed the Fireman's advice. Major Briggs knew they'd be at the Sheriff station and he wanted Coop to get the key to the Great Northern boiler room. Andy was shown a vision of the telegraph pole outside Carrie's house in Odessa. If he failed, it's because he was considered expendable by the Fireman. If we're meant to believe the 'tragic flaw' take, it would have been helpful to see Coop make the mistake. I don't think that going under the Great Northern to make the journey back to 89 is it, because Briggs wanted him there.

Two notes:

1. i'm reading the '430, Richard and Linda' scene as taking place relatively chronologically. It's sometime before Coop and Diane reach the Odessaverse, obviously, because it's this advice that they use to find it. I don't buy that the '430' scene is the Fireman visiting him after the fact to tell him that he fucked up, or anything. I think he was sent on a mission, and did his best to complete it.

2. Andy seeing the pole outside Carrie's does not necessarily imply that this means Coop was meant to do whatever he did. But it suggests that - no matter when it occurred temporally or whether it was intended or not - the Fireman is aware that the events have lead/will lead to that house in Odessa and he feels that this information is important enough to show Andy.

Does anyone think that Laura, at the end of ep. 17, exited to a new existence in Odessa as Carrie Page to avoid dealing with confronting her mother..?

I mean, if Sarah/JUDY could just flick anyone into a new life at will, then how could anyone ever confront her? I think on some level, Laura might've gotten cold feet walking with Cooper in the woods. Maybe approaching the portal to the Fireman's place awoke the immortal & otherworldly part of being (gold orb), and she just wished herself as far away as possible. I think that perhaps she had to live out 25 years as a person who avoided confronting her pain to acknowledge that, on some level, she had to accept it and somehow integrate it into herself for her to ever feel whole. Why else would Carrie Page just resign herself to going on a trip to a town she had never heard of with a complete stranger? She knew that she couldn't run from her past forever, and Cooper appeared to her at a moment when she was ready to deal with the truth (aftermath of dead guy in apartment..?).

Only when she was ready to go home could Cooper take her. In that regard he succeeded... I'm guessing that Sarah/JUDY, when confronted with Laura's raw reaction to the sight of her home, was destroyed. She had never fully acknowledged Laura's suffering, and she could barely function while watching Laura squirm under Leland's criticism. Gaining full awareness of her daughter's pain (and how much pain her own denial caused) might've caused her to disintegrate.

Pinky wrote: Everything he did followed the Fireman's advice. Major Briggs knew they'd be at the Sheriff station and he wanted Coop to get the key to the Great Northern boiler room. Andy was shown a vision of the telegraph pole outside Carrie's house in Odessa. If he failed, it's because he was considered expendable by the Fireman.(...)2. Andy seeing the pole outside Carrie's does not necessarily imply that this means Coop was meant to do whatever he did. But it suggests that - no matter when it occurred temporally or whether it was intended or not - the Fireman is aware that the events have lead/will lead to that house in Odessa and he feels that this information is important enough to show Andy.

Not necessarily. The Fireman might also show danger, that is show the consequences of actions that should NOT be taken.As a matter of fact, the Fireman shows Andy at least one thing that never takes place.

yaxomoxay wrote:Not necessarily. The Fireman might also show danger, that is show the consequences of actions that should NOT be taken.As a matter of fact, the Fireman shows Andy at least one thing that never takes place.

The “Andy positioning Lucy” thing is weird/interesting. I’m trying to remember the exact sequence of events. Is it possible this happened offscreen in Part 17 and we just didn’t see it? I can’t think of any way for this to really make sense though, since Andy is in the cells and then comes up with the prisoners after Mr. C is dead, right? Unless he quickly ducked upstairs before unlocking the cells because he had the timing blocked out in his mind after his meeting of the minds with the Fireman?

yaxomoxay wrote:Not necessarily. The Fireman might also show danger, that is show the consequences of actions that should NOT be taken.As a matter of fact, the Fireman shows Andy at least one thing that never takes place.

The “Andy positioning Lucy” thing is weird/interesting. I’m trying to remember the exact sequence of events. Is it possible this happened offscreen in Part 17 and we just didn’t see it? I can’t think of any way for this to really make sense though, since Andy is in the cells and then comes up with the prisoners after Mr. C is dead, right? Unless he quickly ducked upstairs before unlocking the cells because he had the timing blocked out in his mind after his meeting of the minds with the Fireman?

He said "very important" to Lucy, and I think that was her cue to "remember." I think that Andy essentially did move Lucy into that spot by having seen it in his vision. Somehow he passed that information along, and because of that she wound up in that spot. Perhaps through a shared dream or something.

yaxomoxay wrote:Not necessarily. The Fireman might also show danger, that is show the consequences of actions that should NOT be taken.As a matter of fact, the Fireman shows Andy at least one thing that never takes place.

The “Andy positioning Lucy” thing is weird/interesting. I’m trying to remember the exact sequence of events. Is it possible this happened offscreen in Part 17 and we just didn’t see it? I can’t think of any way for this to really make sense though, since Andy is in the cells and then comes up with the prisoners after Mr. C is dead, right? Unless he quickly ducked upstairs before unlocking the cells because he had the timing blocked out in his mind after his meeting of the minds with the Fireman?

Exactly. To me that scene - which is clearly put there for a reason - implies that things may happen but might also might happen in different ways. In other words, the butterfly effect over and over. If things happen in a different way, then the pole in front of Carrie’s house might not be the pole in front of Carrie’s house. That is, the pole is the pole, but the house might not be Carrie’s. As the owners of Sarah’s house switched, it is possible that the pole that Andy saw was in front of the house of the current (Andy’s universe) owner. From a certain point of view it’s like the chairs - and this is the first time I really think of this scene in a positive way; I never liked it - as in your actions might bring one consequence or another, and the difference might be very very tiny yet substantial. While the “chair” (as an abstract concept) remains, THE chair (the actual one that will show up in the mail) will not and can change depending on the circumstances, and the ripple effect might be huge. If Andy had behaved in a different way, he might’ve gotten the wrong chair. Same goes for Lucy. There’s a whole cause-effect to study in there.